An ex-Pentagon official, who gained fame for blowing the lid off a $22-million, secretive government UFO program, has revealed an image of an alleged UFO ‘mothership.’
Luis Elizondo, a career US Army counterintelligence specialist, previously ran the military’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
Monday night in Philadelphia at a private UFO event, Elizondo dropped what he described as a craft ‘looking like the mothership from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,”‘ referring to the 1977 Steven Spielberg film.
‘Guess what we caught in Romania in 2022? By the way, the US Embassy,’ as Elizondo told attendees at the paid event, gesturing to the photo: ‘That.’
He went on to describe it as a ‘huge mini city floating in the sky.’
But the UFO, which resembles a gleaming disc-shaped craft, has already drawn withering critiques from skeptics, believers and even military UFO witnesses alike, who claim to have traced the photo to, not to the US Embassy, but a Facebook page.
One suggested to DailyMail.com that Elizondo has been lax in his vetting of such images in a bid to add sensational new material to his ‘paid speaking engagements.’
Veteran US Air Force Staff Sergeant, Jeremy McGowan, who witnessed a dramatic UFO encounter himself in the Middle East decades ago, told DailyMail.com that Elizondo’s dubious ‘mothership’ UFO fits a pattern with the man’s past claims.
‘This unfortunate situation with Lue follows my experiences with him nearly exactly,’ McGowan said. ‘I witnessed him exaggerate or outright fabricate information that simply wasn’t true.’
Elizondo unveiled the 2022 Romanian UFO photo at an October 28, 2004 event held at The City Winery, a wine bar in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for $50-$30 per ticket.
‘There’s a whole lot more here folks,’ Elizondo told the audience in a leaked clip. ‘I just want to give you kind of a small taste of what’s going on “behind the scenes.”‘
‘We’re having pilots, military pilots and civilian pilots in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East, report what unimaginably seems impossible,’ as Elizondo began to explain his ‘real photo’ of a UFO.
‘They described it literally ‘the mothership,” Elizondo said.
But despite credible federal reports of ‘mothership’ UFOs over domestic US military sites — investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), an FBI task force, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) and 16 local sheriff’s offices — internet sleuths quickly managed to poke holes in Elizondo’s 2022 Romanian UFO.
John Greenewald Jr, a longtime government transparency advocate who runs The Black Vault, quickly tracked the photo back to a September 13, 2023 post in a Facebook group titled ‘Mysterious Ancient Discoveries.’
Hellbound and Down 